Anatomy Of A Flawed Election

At 4 a.m. on Election Day, a bleary-eyed group of poll workers walked into the Hartford city clerk's office to check the last of more than 1,200 absentee voters off the voter registration lists.

The task was routine; the time and day troublesome.

The job, crucial to ensuring that absentee voters couldn't show up Tuesday at city polling places and vote again, should have been mostly finished days earlier, city and state officials said.

The last-minute scramble, completed less than an hour before polls were to open, was one in a series of lapses that led to some polling places not having registration lists when voting was scheduled to begin at 6 a.m. As a result of the failure, voters were turned away, a judge ordered the extension of hours at two polling places and the state's chief election official filed a complaint with the State Elections Enforcement Commission.

Interviews with poll workers, city employees, volunteers and state officials, as well as a review of internal emails obtained by The Courant, provide some insight into what went wrong:

•Democratic Registrar Olga Vazquez knew Hartford was behind schedule in printing the voter lists six days before Election Day and employees in the city clerk's office were unclear about when the registrars would complete the lists as late as the day before the election, city emails reveal.

Wes Rand / Hartford Courant

Wes Rand / Hartford Courant

•City election officials didn't participate in any of the pre-election conference calls held by the Secretary of the State's office and never submitted a list of moderators with contact numbers, which slowed a proper response Tuesday morning, state records show.

Interviews show that the problems were widespread.

One deputy head moderator told The Courant that, for the first time, moderators were forced to deliver lists to polling places because they were not ready the night before. Joseph Wilkerson said he saw Working Families Party Registrar Urania Petit send workers home by about 8 p.m. even though the absentee ballot check-offs weren't complete and none of the voter lists were ready for moderators to take.

Wilkerson acknowledged leaving boxes of lists in his car Tuesday morning until after 6 a.m. so he could deal with voter machine problems at one polling place.

"Obviously mistakes are made during elections, but there is no reasonable explanation here," Secretary of the State Denise Merrill said. "I just think this was gross misconduct."

Emails show the city clerk's office asked Vazquez a number of times when the registrars planned to check absentee ballots. Vazquez originally told the clerk they would check the ballots on the morning of Oct. 30.

But on Oct. 29, Vazquez informed the clerk's office she would have to postpone, "because we are a bit behind schedule with the printing of the official enrollment list. I will keep you posted."

Vazquez never got back to the clerk, and the day before the election an employee in the clerk's office sent Vazquez an email checking in.

"Do you have any indication as to when you will be coming up to cross off the ballots, the town and city clerk's office has over 1,200 ballots at this time," the employee, Eric Lusa, wrote.

'No Instructions Were Given'

Wilkerson was among those who came in at 4 a.m. to finish checking off the absentee ballots. He and others were given suitcases filled with voter lists at City Hall to deliver to the polls. Wilkerson had four stops in the 1st Assembly District.

"The books were not ready the night before," he said. "The registrars of voters told all the moderators they would have the books ready for them the following morning before opening the polls."

The race to deliver the voting lists was on.

It was now close to 5:30 a.m. — a half-hour before polls opened.

"No instructions were given to the moderators because they weren't anticipating not having the books [the night before]," Wilkerson said. "They didn't have that emergency plan in place. This was the first time that any of us have had to deliver books."

State law requires that registrars give the moderators for each polling place a voter registration list by 8 p.m. the night before the election. The moderators are supposed to be at their polling places 45 minutes before the polls open on Election Day. Some were not, state officials said.

Those are two of the five state election laws that the Secretary of the State's office has alleged Hartford registrars violated in a complaint filed with the State Election Enforcement Commission.

Wilkerson piled into his red Toyota and headed to his first drop off point — Liberty Christian Center on Vine Street, about 21/2 miles from City Hall — arriving there at about 5:45 a.m.

But Wilkerson said there were other problems at Liberty Christian besides the missing lists. Two voting machines were not working, and there were other technical difficulties.

"The location was not ready for voting," he said. "There was a lot of troubleshooting to do. I couldn't leave that place right away. Voters wouldn't have been able to vote there anyway."

He said he stayed there for about 45 minutes, leaving the voter lists for the other three polling places in his car before moving on.

It was now past 6 a.m. and people arriving at some polling places across the city were told they would not be able to vote.

Among the voters who showed up at a polling place that did not have a registration list was Merrill, the state's top election official, who said she realized quickly when she arrived at Hartford Seminary that this would not be an ordinary Election Day.

"I thought maybe they were just a little late at this polling place because you would never dream someone wouldn't print out the voters list," Merrill said. "It is such a basic thing."

Merrill, who was able to vote by submitting an affidavit, called her office and was told it was a bigger problem.

The office's election hotline started ringing at 6:05 a.m. with complaints. State Elections Director Peggy Reeves immediately began reaching out to the Hartford registrars.

"I called the registrars' office and, much to my surprise, somebody answered and said there had been a computer glitch and, 'we are delivering them as we speak' and that everything would be open in 15 to 20 minutes," Reeves said.

Wilkerson said he arrived at his second location — Grace Lutheran School — at about 6:30. As he delivered the books to the moderator, he noticed poll workers taking down names and checking ID's.

"I told her she really should have waited for the book, but she said it was her responsibility not to turn any voter away, and I understand that," Wilkerson said.

The moderator was able to transfer the names she took down over to the voter book.

Hartford attorney John Q. Gale arrived at his polling place — United Methodist Church on Farmington Avenue — before 6:30. Gale planned to vote and then serve as an election monitor at the church, which would be Wilkerson's third stop.

When Gale arrived he saw at least 15 people milling around and grumbling. He said he heard someone say, "Can you believe this?"

Gale said he noticed at least six poll workers standing at the tables where people were supposed to be registering to vote. He approached Moderator Nathaniel Jenkins to see what was happening.

"I told him you have a lot of pretty upset people here and you need to do something to try and solve the problem," Gale said. "It struck me that no one was on their phone or seemed to be doing anything."

Gale said Jenkins walked away and called someone, but came back and said there was nothing he could do. When reached for comment this week, Jenkins declined to talk about his role on Election Day.

"People were coming and going that whole time. I would guess at least 30 people [left without voting] while I was out there," Gale said.

Gale was standing outside when Wilkerson's car pulled into the parking lot.

Wilkerson got out of the car, wheeling the black luggage bag behind him. Gale said as Wilkerson moved toward the door, people standing around him asked: "Is that the list?'"

He quietly said, "yes it is" and walked into the building.

Gale checked his watch. It was 7:11 a.m.

The first person voted at that polling place at 7:20.

By then, Wilkerson was on his way to his last stop, the Hartford Seminary, where Gov. Dannel P. Malloy was waiting. Rather than vote by affidavit as Merrill had done, the governor waited half an hour for the voter lists to show up so he could vote.

Unsure of how widespread the problem was around the city, Malloy's campaign set its lawyers in motion. Within a few hours they would go to court seeking to keep all 24 polling places open for at least an hour.

"This wasn't an issue that wasn't controllable," said Attorney William Bloss, who argued the complaint in Superior Court. "A machine goes does down or a memory card doesn't work or a water main breaks there's nothing you can do. But this was a fundamental part of the process that they clearly knew the night before the election wasn't ready and that is inexcusable."

Despite all that, Bloss said, "They still could have remedied the problem if they had delivered the lists quicker."

Wilkerson said he made a mistake by staying at one polling place for 45 minutes while the other voting lists sat in his car.

"I do recognize that, on my end, what I probably should have done was taken those books to each location and then went back and trouble-shooted," Wilkerson said. "I didn't do that. I'm used to taking care of each location before moving on to the next location. A lot of the shortcomings, I feel, are on some of our watches, including mine.

"I feel bad for what happened to the voters, I really do."

'All Kinds Of Excuses'

In an election night interview, Vazquez said a number of things went wrong.

She said the office was facing constraints from cuts made to its budget. A name was printed incorrectly on an earlier version of the ballot. Several new moderators were hired to work Election Day, she said, and they weren't trained properly. She acknowledged that the registrars and their deputies helped train the poll workers, but said her own training was done correctly.

Vazquez also indicated that money set aside by city administrators specifically for the election wasn't released to the registrars until close to Election Day. City officials have disputed that budgetary issues played a role. Maribel La Luz, Mayor Pedro Segarra's communications director, said Friday that the registrars have had access to election funds since Oct. 31.

Vazquez could not be reached for follow-up comment. Sheila Hall, the Republican registrar, also could not be reached for comment.

Petit, the Working Families registrar, said in a prepared statement Friday that her primary assignment in the election process was to oversee new Election Day registration, "which ran smoothly."

Reeves said Vazquez offered many of the same answers when Reeves walked over to City Hall after 7:30 a.m. Reeves said she spotted the three registrars on the steps.

"I asked them how this could have happened," Reeves, the state elections official, said. "They came up with all kinds of excuses from budget cuts to not enough people working to blaming the city clerk for kicking them out of their office the night before."

"But I think they just waited way too long to start the process," she said.

Frustrations Mount

Nearly 24 hours after the scramble to check off absentee voters, election officials were back finalizing vote totals. The final vote was counted around 4 a.m. on Nov. 5, but the drama wasn't over.